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Drawn & Quarterly Offers 7 More Volumes of Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro Manga
posted on by Egan Loo
North American publisher Drawn & Quarterly announced on Wednesday that it will release more of Shigeru Mizuki's supernatural manga Kitaro (GeGeGe no Kitarō) in seven volumes for a "kid-friendly" price of US$12.95 each. The stories center on an inhuman boy who straddles the line between the human and supernatural worlds.
The new collection will begin next March with The Birth Of Kitaro:
"Kitaro's Birthday" reveals the origin story of the half-yokai boy Kitaro and his tiny eyeball father, Medama Oyaji. "Neko Musume versus Nezumi Otoko" is the first of Mizuki's stories to feature the popular recurring character Neko Musume, a little girl who transforms into a cat when she gets angry or hungry. Other stories in The Birth of Kitaro ["Nopperabō," "Gyūki," "Toge no Yōkai," "Makura Kaeshi," "Hideri Gami"] draw heavily from Japanese folklore, with Kitaro taking on legendary Japanese yokai like the Nopperabo and Makura Gaeshi, and fighting the monstrous recurring villain Gyuki.
Six more volumes, each with over 150 pages of manga, will follow with "stories from the 1960s golden age" of the series:
- Kitaro Meets Nurarihyon (Spring 2016)
- The Great Tanuki War (Fall 2016)
- Kitaro's Strange Adventures (Winter 2017)
- Kitaro the Vampire Slayer (Spring 2017)
- Kitaro's Yokai Battles (Fall 2017)
- The Trial of Kitaro (Winter 2018)
Drawn & Quarterly released its first Kitaro volume in 2013. The American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services Association named the book among its "Great Graphic Novels for Teens" in 2014, and the Texas Library Association also placed it on its Maverick Graphic Novel Reading List last year.
The manga, which began in 1959 under the name Hakaba Kitarō, has spawned seven television series (including one Hakaba Kitarō anime), several animated movies, and two live-action films.
Drawn & Quarterly is also publishing Mizuki's NonNonBâ, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, Showa: A History of Showa Japan, and Hitler manga. Mizuki won the Asahi Prize in 2009 for his contributions to culture and society. Overseas, he won an Eisner in the United States and the Angouleme Award for Best Comic in France.
